Our Lady of the Exile : Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami

"Our Lady of the Exile is a valuable contribution to the growing literature on Catholic and folk devotional religion. It will spark fruitful discussion in courses on popular religion and/or Latino history and religiosity."

--Church History

"...the careful research and analysis presented in this volume make it a valuable source for scholars and students of Latino religion and religious studies generally, as well as American and ethnic studies, anthropology, and American Catholicism."

--Catholic Historical Review

"...the careful research and analysis presented in this volume make it a valuable source for scholars and students of Latino religion and religious studies generally, as well as American and ethnic studies, anthropology, and American Catholicism."

--The Catholic Historical Review

"The book is a welcome addition to the growing literature on popular religion in the United States....This book will be appealing to students of the Cuban experience in the United States and to professors seeking a text that provides ethnographic details on a contemporary religious experience of one of the larger Latino groups in the United States."

--Sociology of Religion

Oxford University Press Web Site, May, 2002

This is a study of Cuban-American popular Catholicism, focusing on the shrine of Our Lady of Charity in Miami. Most non-Hispanic residents of Miami do not even know that the shrine exists, yet it is the sacred center of the Cuban community in exile. Founded in 1973, it is now the sixth largest Catholic pilgrimage site in the United States, annually attracting hundreds of thousands of pilgrims.

Combining historical and ethnographic methods, Tweed's work draws on more than 300 interviews with visitors to the shrine, as well as documentary records, survey data, newspapers, periodicals and pamphlets published by the shrine, and devotional letters written to the shrine from Cuba and the United States. He uncovers not only why the shrine attained such importance and attracts so many visitors, but also what it can tell us about larger issues of religion, identity, and place. He argues that while religious meanings in a given ritual context are always constructed and contested, they are also, at some basic level, shared. In this instance, he contends, the shared meaning of Our Lady of Charity is diaspora nationalism. By means of the symbols of the shrine, he says, the diaspora "imaginatively constructs its collective identity and transports itself to the Cuba of memory and desire."